I discovered a few hours ago that my WordPress install appears to have been infested by spammers. The front page displays OK, but following what should be on-site navigational links – particularly when using the on-site search feature – sometimes redirects the user to various sites selling C**l*s and V**gr* and the like.

It's not clear to me at this moment whether the problem lies in a trojan PHP file, a rogue plugin, a hacked .htaccess file, something lurking in the MySQL database or some unholy combination thereof: whatever the cause, I won't be posting again until I can fix the problem.

I'll almost certainly have to take the site down completely at some point to clean out the underlying infestation and reinstall everything from scratch. Thankfully, I do have backups of my content, so no posts or comments should be lost.

I can but apologise for this interruption in normal service and ask regular readers to watch the front page for updates.

A Personal Letter From Steve Martin.

The Collected Works of Shakespeare: The Movie.

[Via James Nicoll]

War at sea.

[Via jwz]

BP goes for a high score.

Jus' Checkin'.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Christopher Andrew, MI5's official historian, on job satisfaction:

[Andrew...] also claimed that the human resources consultants employed to discover the levels of job satisfaction at the British domestic intelligence service had found that there was "only one organisation they had investigated that had higher morale: the publisher Mills & Boon".

Which does rather beg the question of which other organisations they had investigated.¹

1. I'm sure MI5 is a much happier place to work right now than, say, BP's PR agency. ↩

Adobe and Wired magazine apparently think that the future of paid content amounts to pictures of text:

Using a Microsoft-like facility for descriptive yet forgettable product names, [Adobe's] "Digital Viewer technology" creates "a digital magazine format" made up of pictures. Twice I asked publicist Russell Brady how this output differs from exporting a PNG from Acrobat, and twice Brady refused to answer. (He didn't ignore the question. He just didn't answer it.)

Just imagine how different history might have been if AOL and Compuserve had just hit upon the notion of rendering web pages as .GIF files.

[Via Daring Fireball (Again!)]

BPGlobalPR Billboards: terribly funny.

[Via Daring Fireball]

The world's first volcano renovation: it'll be pretty damn spectacular when it's done.

Although this article about the Oberammergau passion play focuses on the recent tensions over modernisation of the play, what really struck me was the way the event takes over the entire town:

[...] For months, even the village's elderly and sick residents have been doing their part, while younger people have been reshaping their plans to accommodate the event. This year's Philip the apostle interrupted his doctoral studies, and one of the two actors who will play Jesus gave up his job, which was too far away. The mayor issued a "hair and beard decree" on Ash Wednesday of last year, and since then men, women and children have left their hair and beards largely uncut, so that they will look the way people supposedly did in ancient Jerusalem.

Locals use phrases like community, homeland and identity when they attempt to explain the event to outsiders. Anyone who was born in Oberammergau or has lived there for at least 20 years is entitled to take part in the festival. One of the many attractions of the event is that it brings a welcome change to residents who have spent the last nine years working in their ordinary jobs, as teachers, plumbers or landscapers, and who now get the chance to appear in the global spotlight. In fact, it must be painful not to be a part of it.

It would have been nice to have seen some comments in the article from locals who are ineligible to take part because they've only been living there for, say, a decade. Do they find themselves counting the years until they can take part, or do they live a life in parallel with that of their longer-established neighbours for the duration of the festivities?